You've just suggested that an individual company be allowed to restrict the ability of some users to post whatever they want. Cue screams involving the first amendment and a/. article phrased as a question.

You've just suggested that an individual company be allowed to restrict the ability of some users to post whatever they want. Cue screams involving the first amendment and a/. article phrased as a question.

The first amendment doesn't apply to a company's ability to censor content on a site they own.

it should probably pick less karma-whore targets for it. First of all, investment banks and insurance companies are indistinguishable. They are essentially in the same business. But to answer the actual question, why wouldn't you want a banker to be attracted to money? Not everyone should be socially conscious as a job requirement. Only if it is in fact part of the job. I mean I wouldn't want a nurse or doctor who were sociopaths. But a banker? Why not? If it makes them better bankers, then more power to them.

To be a Doctor or surgeon requires years of dedicated study and work. That's not a feature of psychopathy - quite the opposite. Psychopaths are pathetic individuals who thrive only in the most superficial quick win environments where chancers and spivs can make it big by spinning the wheel.

So many people seem to think emotional control = psychopath. Quite the contrary... psychopaths have very poor emotional control as well as concentration... they are also have extremely poor impulse control. In any environment where you have to deal with people over long periods... they fail horribly by getting caught out eventually. They only succeed when they can wreck their havoc and then vanish up/out leaving others to clean up.

I'll give you that the statement would be helped by citation. But I won't give you the BS. I would agree with the gp post. I heard it from other sources (which I trust). The sources were academic. This type of inquiry was within their field of academic interest. But I too don't have a citation. The causal link seems to be that to cut into a human being and not be repulsed by it takes a certain sadistic inclination. So, while these people are not your mobster type psychopaths, a good fraction of sur

The problem isn't their attraction to money, it's their medical inability to give a shit about anyone else.

But does that make them worse bankers? You can structure incentives in such a way that in order to help themselves they have to help the bank's clients. My point is that this "article" falls in the trap which is common nowadays -- failing to separate function from the form. Most trading nowadays is done by computers. They, too, don't give a crap about anyone else. But so what? They are good traders. Rather than requiring that only extreme extroverts rise to the top (which is really what this movement

Can you structure things in that fashion. One of the attractions of the entire industry is the promise of reward for sound investing. The problem is that a psychopath can game the system by achieving the reward through carefully constructed investments that will collapse inevitably, but after the reward has been gained. In some cases, those rewards appear to have been gained simply by lying (various iterations of cooking the books), and thus catching the cooking takes longer than the reward cycle.

The only way I can see it is to push the reward off into the distance by years, so that whatever investment strategy is made today, the guy doing it will have to wait a year, two years, or even more before they get their reward.

Even where systems like that have been implemented (ie. paid in shares rather than in cash or perks), it seems there are still ways for a sufficiently nasty person to grasp the reward that ultimately they did not deserve.

The problem is that a psychopath can game the system by achieving the reward through carefully constructed investments that will collapse inevitably, but after the reward has been gained. In some cases, those rewards appear to have been gained simply by lying (various iterations of cooking the books), and thus catching the cooking takes longer than the reward cycle.

Then the system is badly designed. Increase the reward cycle. Everyone employed is familiar with vesting rewards. Those are there to promote employment longevity. So you can't tell me no such mechanisms exist. If the system is designed for chasing short-term gains, don't expect psychologists to fix it. Change the system.

Even where systems like that have been implemented (ie. paid in shares rather than in cash or perks), it seems there are still ways for a sufficiently nasty person to grasp the reward that ultimately they did not deserve.

Ok, so something is broken. Fix it. But psycho tests? Those are appropriate only when people might be ask to receive no reward for their work (for example because their work require

The problem is that in any system, regardless of the incentives for actions that benefit everyone, the psychopaths will always look for other ways to gain only for themselves.

I am not sure I see this as a problem though. You are meant to try to gain advantage when you on a job. Otherwise, it's a dead end job. Progress happens because people find subversive ways to work inside the system. The system either gets patched to prevent the problem from happening again or it recognizes it as the new and better way of doing things. Creative destruction is there by design. I am saying that it has not been demonstrated that it is a disability. Once again, computers have NO empathy.

Sometimes, it's ingenuity, and sometimes planning. But sometimes it's blind stumbling in the dark. But those are the prophets of progress. It takes the system for the new advances to gain wide adaptation. I pretty much covered this here http://slashdot.org/~superwiz/journal/169837 [slashdot.org] 5 years ago. Pardon the typos.

The problem here is that an investment banker, for instance, should be in the game not only for personal reward, but also to help their clients. There is considerable opportunity for an investment banker to further their own enrichment that will do substantial harm to their clients.

Greed is good. Greed unmoderated by any sense of responsibility to anyone but one's self is not a good thing.

Greed unmoderated by any sense of responsibility to anyone but one's self is not a good thing.

That makes no sense. A is good. But only if A is not A. That's the gist of this argument. Bankers should understand banking. It's not their job to get in touch with their emotions. They are not playing bankers on TV. They are actually being bankers. If there is a need to change their job objectives in order to better serve bank's clients, you change the banker's incentive structure. You don't say they must first ask themselves what's the right thing to do. It's a job, for God's sake. It has as mu

Did they? You often hear breakdowns of donations by party and organization within a profession. But you rarely hear breakdown by profession. I don't think (not certain though) that bankers are the top donors. I think doctors and lawyers are. Doctors donate to Republicans to advocate limits on law suits (doctors' largest cost) and lawyers donate to Democrats to expand law suit opportunities.

They bail out didn't happen because the bankers cried. No one gives a damn about the bankers. It happened because there is no logistics for such a bankruptcy. And due to interconnected nature of the system, without bankruptcy resolution, all debts governing the world finances would be defaulted on. If the logistics for bankruptcy existed, the banks would be forced to accept 70 cents on the dollar and move on. This has nothing to do with psychology. It has everything to do with the government's inabili

The U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission reported its findings in January 2011. It concluded that "the crisis was avoidable and was caused by: Widespread failures in financial regulation, including the Federal Reserve’s failure to stem the tide of toxic mortgages; Dramatic breakdowns in corporate governance including too many financial firms acting recklessly and taking on too much risk; An explosive mix of excessive bo

First of all, investment banks and insurance companies are indistinguishable.

This is patently untrue. Sure investment banks to make counter party deals that they believe will insure them against losses on other investments, and people refer to this as "insurance." But it is nothing like insurance. The insurance business is based on statistics and actuarial data. The data are used to make rational decisions about how much to charge a particular group for insuring a particular risk. The risks are well known and thoroughly accounted for. In fact ins

Damn straight we want to change it. If companies are getting so big that they become "too big to fail" and governments would rather throw money at them then watch them collapse, then some other mechanism must be found to mitigate the destructive behaviour of higher-ups. I wouldn't care, if not for the fact that their screw ups can wreak massive amounts of havoc against innocent people.

Damn straight we want to change it. If companies are getting so big that they become "too big to fail" and governments would rather throw money at them then watch them collapse, then some other mechanism must be found to mitigate the destructive behaviour of higher-ups. I wouldn't care, if not for the fact that their screw ups can wreak massive amounts of havoc against innocent people.

Of course, this all depends on if the tests are actually reliable.

The thing I find most frustrating is the ABSOLUTE HYPOCRISY of these major finance industry institutions.

One second they LOUDLY AND PROUDLY talk up the benefits of THE FREE MARKET but the moment that FREE becomes FREE FALL they want ABSOLUTE GUARANTEES that there will be no actual consequences to their screwup.

It's called risk-vs-reward, sometimes you push the risk too far, and sometimes you get burned.Survival of the fittest.Darwinian Evolution.

There have been studies posted about on Slashdot that state a ridiculously high percentage of all CEOs have significant mental problems. I think it was close to 50%. They're definitely more driven than clock punchers with no real motivation. They better watch their ass for business owners like me though. I operate lean and mean in a customer centric way and are super motivated to take out my competition by simply doing better instead of just running the company with my balls as a status symbol and build

I've worked with enough people who are nuts to think that if we're going to test the leaders, we should test everyone and put the psychopaths out of the workplace entirely.

One bad person on a team can not only make life miserable, but ruin the work output of the team, drive away anyone competent and damage everyone else's careers when they're associated with the failed team's product.

Isn't it generally illegal, under the ADA, to discriminate on the basis of mental illness, unless it can be shown said illness directly hinders job performance? It seems to me that being a psychopath not only doesn't hinder job performance if you're a banker, it might make you better at it, in the same way being somewhat Asperger's tends to make you better at jobs in the technical field?

"Testing" is not for senior management. Like "austerity" and "cost-cutting" and "right-to-work", such things are meant for the less important, less productive members of our society (aka "the 47%" as described by a member of the senior management set not long ago). We can't expect the job creators to submit to something as demeaning as testing. It's just not done, and we run the risk of them deciding to deprive those of us who are the takers, the mooches, the leeches of their singular talents by "going G

The expected behaviour for any corporation is to maximise profits at the expense of nearly anything else. Certainly corporations are not expected to show empathy or compassion (except as PR exercises in the service of greater profit). In a person such complete narcissism and lack of empathy would be indicative of tendendcies towards sociopathic personality disorder.

Is it any wonder then, that psychopaths are drawn to, and probably well suited to, senior positions in corporations, where their natural tendencies towards such behavior are rewarded rather than punished.

It's somehow indicative of our complete lack of self-awareness as a society that we create these psychopathic institutions, and are then suprised and appalled when psycopaths end up running them. The problem isn't individual psycopaths as such, it goes far deeper than that, and testing managers for psychopathic tendencies will change nothing.

Such tests would be used to *ensure* that psychopaths are chosen for senior management, so that no one unsuitable (i.e. non-psycho) slipped through by accident. As other posters have noted, just take a lot at senior management of large corps if you don't think this is true.

If you block the psychopaths with the goal of blocking people who are attracted to money, status and power, who will be left to run the corporations? Corporations are set up to attract people who are attracted to those things... It's an incentive system. If you disqualify people who want those things, then all you really have left are the INTJs [keirsey.com], also known as the "mastermind" personality type:

Although they are highly capable leaders, Masterminds are not at all eager to take command, preferring to stay in the background until others demonstrate their inability to lead. Once they take charge, however, they are thoroughgoing pragmatists. Masterminds are certain that efficiency is indispensable in a well-run organization, and if they encounter inefficiency -- any waste of human and material resources -- they are quick to realign operations and reassign personnel. Masterminds do not feel bound by established rules and procedures, and traditional authority does not impress them, nor do slogans or catchwords. Only ideas that make sense to them are adopted; those that don't, aren't, no matter who thought of them. Remember, their aim is always maximum efficiency.

By definition, INTJs do not want power. They want results and efficiency. If they take power, they try to get out from under it as soon as they can. But do you really want to replace the psychopaths with masterminds? The only group whose personality type is usually preceded by the adjective "evil?" Doesn't sound like a good plan to me.

One potentially interesting caveat to your observation: people's personalities shift over time. When I was younger, I tested out as INTJ consistently. Nowadays I test out as INTP. It might be nice if INTJs ran things. I know I've always thought so.:) But INTJs don't necessarily stay INTJs forever.

I worked with a genuine psychopath; no hyperbole; a true psychopath. This guy could charm the pants off anyone. If you met him you loved him; that simple. But after around 6 months you wanted him dead. After a while I learned some key skills to working with him. One was to nail everything down in an email and I mean everything. If you didn't have everything nailed down he would change the past. If you said you could have something done by the 30th and didn't put it in an email then around the 20th he would announce at a meeting that you were going to be late with your promise to have it done by the 25th like he told the client and put in the contract, a contract he would swear on a stack of bibles that you had looked over. The key here was that you probably did look over a contract that said the 30th and he had an email from you saying that it looked fine. So as I said, everything must go in an email so the trick was if he handed you some paper you scanned it and attached it to the email replying that you had read the contract.

Most people were unwilling to go to such lengths and thus would be screwed over and over until they quit. The key to understanding this guy was that he simply had zero empathy. Not little but zero. So if he hurt you for some tiny gain of his own so be it. But this is different from someone who is say mean as in a bully, for them being mean is the goal. For my psychopathic co-worker you had to understand that he had his own desires and that was it. He didn't weigh pro and cons in any normal fashion. If you quit then you could be replaced with a fool who might be easier to screw.

I long ago left working with him but in the years since I have encountered really nice person after person who clench their fists and say horrible things about this guy. They all say the exact same basic thing; wow charisma coming out his ass until he sets you on fire to warm his hands.

On a superficial basis a company might justify that having someone like this around is useful for the moment that you need to charm some upset client. This might work in theory but what you forget is that the moment it is advantageous for this type of person to screw you they will screw you. Your company might say, "they wouldn't do something so stupid as this industry is too small" but keep in mind that there are two incomprehensible factors at play. This is a person who does not give the tiniest of craps what anyone really thinks as long as they can't actually do anything. The other factor is that they will be able to charm themselves out of almost any situation. So if you say that they will never work in this industry again you are wrong. You will make a solid case to other people you know really well who also respect you and your opinion but the psychopath will meet them and turn their opinion 180 degrees and land on their feet.

This might seem a bit long winded but after dealing with a true psychopath it is hard to believably explain the functioning of someone who simply is incapable of sympathy and has 100% confidence that normal consequences don't apply to them. Take any situation where a normal person might say ooh this might blow up in my face, or I wouldn't do that to my worst enemy and remember that a psychopath will do it and would do it to their mother if there was even a tiny chance of them somehow benefiting.

So when I see the whole banking crisis and people are suggesting that these guys inadvertently destroyed trillions of dollars of the wealth in the US along with their own companies and I just remember my psychopath and think that if he was getting low on gas and could push a button that refilled his tank but destroyed a company all he would think is "cool Free gas" while the rest of us would frown about what kind of dick would even create such a button.

Or in a less knee-jerk way: have we verified that this is actually a problem? What issues arise from psychopaths being in these positions of authority? Is there a way we can mitigate those negative effects while still playing to the strengths of the psychopath?

Hell yes, this is a problem. Watch The Corporation. It basically shows that most corporations are psychopathic, and I believe that most governments are too. This is fundamentally at odds with our basic notion that people in charge should have some sort of human decency. If the majority of us have empathy but are ruled by psychopaths without empathy, this is a very very serious problem...especially when many people will go ahead and assume that the people in authority have empathy.

Basically the people who have the most say on how this world operates (including whether to wage war, take people's money, pollute the environment or not) are often (or mostly, depending on your point of view) behaving like psychopaths. This is nuts and it really goes a long way towards explaining the current state of affairs.

Even psychopaths (more correctly, sociopaths, as noted below. They have no 'organic' cause for their 'disease') might be empathic. As an individual, surrounded by 'normal' people, they also may seem to be normal and share the same feeling as the group. But with the 'wrong crowd', watch out. Group think, peer pressure, whatever you want to call it, is very powerful. Authoritarians are professional chameleons in this respect. Good parents are ve

I just wanted to +1 this because I don't have mod points. Sociopaths very much do have no empathic response to others. My ex wife was diagnosed as a sociopath after our divorce... this wasn't exactly news to me but was a bitter pill to swallow. Since it came on late in life, it seems most likely that it was actually caused by physical damage in her case (which we can likely trace back to a car accident she had in 2003 where she did suffer minor brain damage). She literally feels no empathy toward others...

Actually, I would say that a society ruled by "empathy" would quickly collapse, as the people in charge would be unable to make decisions based on an objective cost/benefit analysis, but instead would be paralyzed by emotional concerns. It's a common cliche that "you can't put a price on human life", but every modern society does, constantly, and if a society's leaders can't do this, the society will fail.

To use a highly oversimplified example: Let's assume that we can prevent 50% of automobile related deaths by imposing a regulation that increases the cost of a car by $1.00. Most people would say that would be worthwhile. To prevent 50% of the remaining deaths, we can increase the cost of a car by $100.00. To prevent 50% of the remaining deaths (this report was commissioned by Zeno, by the way), the cost increases by $1000.00. And so on. There is a point where someone must say, "Yeah, the harm done by increasing costs that much outweighs the value of the lives saved." An "empathic" person would be unable to draw that line, as he'd be unable to say "Some known percentage of people will die in accidents, people who COULD have been saved if we'd spent more money." This carries across many different fields and areas of human activity, from drug trials to engineering. There's a point where some level of risk must be deemed "acceptable". The more empathic someone is, the more difficult it will be for them to consciously allow a certain number of probable deaths or injuries.

Emotions are easy to manipulate. I show you (generic you, not you personally) a bunch of pictures, along with heart-wrenching stories, of Palestinean children killed by Israeli bombs. "How can we support such murderers?", you ask. Then I show you heart-wrenching stories of Israeli children killed by Palestinean bombs. "We have to protect these people!", you cry. If your decision is based on how much you CARE, you can't make a decision. You have to step back and evaluate which side, if either, is more useful to support for reasons totally irrelevant to how many children are getting killed. You have to reduce people to numbers and statistics -- or you can't decide, and meanwhile, even more people die while you waffle.

More abstractly, there will always be more problems than there are resources to solve them. Someone has to decide whose suffering to alleviate, and whose to ignore. People who are too empathic can't; at best, they'll make decisions based on whichever crisis is most heart-touching to them (usually determined by which one has the best propaganda), not on other considerations.

Most of our society, at all levels, can only function if we set aside our feelings and focus on facts. An umpire shouldn't make calls based on which team he wants to win, even if his motivation is sympathy for the feelings of the team that keeps losing all the time. A boss shouldn't fire or hire people based on who he likes more, but on job performance. We disdain those who show favoritism to friends and relatives, but it is psychologically normal to be more sympathetic to those closest to you. It is psychologically *abnormal* to make decisions without regard to your emotional connections to people -- but people in power are expected, even required by law, to do precisely that, to decide things without consulting their feelings.

Thus, it is inevitable that those with the least empathy will rise to positions of power, because those with the most can't do the job.

(I've run into a depressing number of people who are convinced this is not the way the world is; that if only we all CARED enough, there'd never be a need for hard decisions, because everyone would just do the right thing, all the time.)

Actually, you over-simplified. You presume someone cannot be empathetic AND be able to do a cost/benefit analysis and make a decision. In the military, you do both frequently...PFC Johnny has had his mother go into hospital for cancer. She may not make it. SGT Dave works to ensure PFC Johnny gets home to see Mom before she passes. 12 months later, SGT Dave has no issue sending PFC Johnny through the door first as part of the sweep team as he is the best person for the job. If PFC Johnny gets killed as part of the sweep, SGT Dave will be sad as he has lost a team member and (if he is a good NCO) a protege, but he will move on and scream to his leadership for a replacement for the now dead PFC Johnny while also shedding a tear at the memorial service for PFC Johnny.

That disassociation causes a lot of problems for soldiers after the fact.

Survivor guilt, PTSD, that sort of thing. Empathetic and ruthless objectivity happens but it's not necessarily healthy. Granted, soldiers are the wrong sort of people to face this problem in the first place because you're imposing inherently contradictory goals on someone who lacks years of experience at life trying to grapple with these things already. Have empathy for your own side but no empathy for the other, or the people you're going to get killed.

That was why dehumanizing the other guys was somewhat easier, they weren't real people you killed, they weren't good people or the like, so you don't need to have empathy for them. Officers didn't associate with 'the men' because they might become to attached, and leadership is from the upper, good class not lower, parasite classes because getting them killed was no problem, the existed to serve. As we've moved away from those attitudes as a society it becomes harder and more conflicting to be off killing each other on the whims of leadership.

The post you were replying to is a bit over extreme I agree. Everyone is somewhere on a spectrum of empathy and apathy to antipathy (hating everyone). You definitely don't want the latter in charge, sort of self evidently, you don't want people who think bankrupting customers is good for them. But the other two, it's not like you want people who have absolutely no empathy, they need to appreciate what the numbers actually mean to deal with them. But you still need to make decisions based on the numbers. Sometimes more apparently empathetic behaviour emerges because two objectively behaving sides collide, both look at the data for their problem and behave in the optimal way for them. Corporations aim to maximize return to shareholders, governments aim to improve lives of the maximum number of people and the two orbit around each other a bit. The US is troubling because the government seems to have shifted too far in the direction of aiming to improve the corporate bottom line rather than the average bottom line of its citizens, it is a spectrum, but you can be too far one way or the other.

No I think in good leaders, this goes hand in hand. If you aren't suffering from some equivalent of PTSD after doing a job like what he described, you aren't qualified to lead humans. Most of us simply don't have to deal with stakes quite that high, but should still be doing a cost/benefit analysis while also trying to empathize.

The more empathic someone is, the more difficult it will be for them to consciously allow a certain number of probable deaths or injuries.

No, the easier it will be for them to "feel for" ALL affected. This includes the positively affected. If a decision saves the lives of 1000 while killing 1, empathy doesn't mean "feel for the 1, ignore the 1000".

Also, how is selfishness more rational? How would a sociopath do ANY calculation other than "does it give me what I want, fuck everyone else" --- ?

Someone has to decide whose suffering to alleviate, and whose to ignore. People who are too empathic can't; at best, they'll make decisions based on whichever crisis is most heart-touching to them

Bullshit. There's plenty of strong people who just happen to have empathy, too. You just don't know em. Just like there's plenty of weak-ass sociopaths. You just don't recognize em. How does that quote go? "Gentleness can only be expected from the strong."? I think you have it exactly upside down, and good luck with that.

People who are directly empathic tend to be worse at evaluating indirect harm.

So you're moving the goal posts; can you at least clearly say what you're moving them to? What is "directly empathic"? I assume it's somehow magically different from what we were previously talking about, "having empathy" (which is simply an additional "thing" to have, like sight or hearing). But before I can engage you in this new, fascinating subject, please define what "directly empathic" means. Thanks:P

They may be able to weigh up one death against ten, but it's harder for them to weigh up one death against some minor savings to the cost of production of a million cars, which allow the buyers of those cars to work slightly shorter hours, which make them slightly less tired when driving, which leads to, on average, ten fewer deaths on the road.

Are you confusing empathy with lack of intelligence, or with being emotional?

Ideally you want someone who cares about humanity in the abstract

You know what, that reminds me so much of something I read just a few pages a ago in a book from Erich Fromm that I'm going to try to find and translate it. IIRC, it was something about those who believe "in humanity" (or as you put it, who "care in the abstract"), but not in humans.

In the meantime I'll just have to disagree. Having empathy makes some things require and induce more personal growth, sure, and that growth is often enough accompanied by pain, of course; but that's the whole fucking point of living basically, to grow.* All those "number decisions" you cite ultimately (should) serve to enable actual individual people to live their actual individual lives, with their actual individual thoughts and deeds. We eat to live, we don't live to eat, and there is no abstract humanity. There's just you and me, the people next door, the people all over the world. That doesn't mean statistics or math aren't useful, or that hard decisions don't have to be made; which brings us back to empathy and rationality/intelligence not being mutually exclusive... but if you mistake your mental, simplified models with the actual thing they're supposed to represent, then you're drifting not into the realm of increased efficiency, you're simply loosing the plot.

* So no, you don't really want the ones who don't ever bat an eyelid to make those "hard" (one might say "non-trivial") decisions; they learn nothing from them, and in gamer-speak you'd basically be wasting XP points on units who can't level up. Instead, let the others level up, and after some initial insecurity they'll outperform the "detached" people in more ways than not. I know that's hardly how to construct a good argument, but I like that comparison anyway. Haha.

and, particularly unlike the standard psychopath, has no great love for themself.

I hate to be a pain, but I also disagree on this one. I think respect of others without self-respect is a lie, a delusion. Selfishness no, but self-love.. of course! Don't trust anyone too proud or too humble...

This means that management should be unempathic, but not necessarily psychopathic. Ideally you want someone who cares about humanity in the abstract, but not in individual cases - and, particularly unlike the standard psychopath, has no great love for themself.

No, it means that management should not play up empathic concerns but should exclude people who lack all (or sufficient) empathy. In the example of life-saving improvements to cars, there is a balance to be found. If you put in too many expensive improvements, you will make the cars no fun to drive and so expensive that nobody will buy them. No lives will be saved. If you include none of them, no lives will be saved. If you include the most cost effective ones, many lives will be saved. There's an opt

Emotions are easy to manipulate. I show you (generic you, not you personally) a bunch of pictures, along with heart-wrenching stories, of Palestinean children killed by Israeli bombs. "How can we support such murderers?", you ask. Then I show you heart-wrenching stories of Israeli children killed by Palestinean bombs. "We have to protect these people!", you cry. If your decision is based on how much you CARE, you can't make a decision. You have to step back and evaluate which side, if either, is more useful

Not at all. Normal people can make hard decisions. If what you said is so, we'd never be able to raise children right. They'd all be spoiled rotten.

You show confusion typical of the thinking on this subject. I've taught classes. I wished everyone would do all the work, get it all right, and not cheat. Then I could hand out all A's. It never happened of course. But I felt that not being a fair judge was the greater disservice to the students. Telling them that they did fine when in fact they did not I saw as not doing them any real favor. They learned the material, or they flunked. Some did respond to early bad news with greater effort, and were able to pass. I didn't like seeing anyone fail, but it was no strain for me to hand out the appropriate grade. This is not being sociopathic.

One of the best lines that sums up the confusion is "greed is good". No. By definition, greed cannot be good. If it is good, then it's not greed. If it is greed, then it cannot be good. Negotiating for more pay may or may not be greedy.

The sociopaths are the people who will choose to take $100 more even knowing that will cost 1000 people $10 more in expenses to deal with the problems their act causes. In other words, they don't care that their gain is a net loss to society. They can't see that what hurts society hurts them too. That kind of enlightened thinking is too abstract for them. I'm not talking about the desperate sort of petty thief who will smash a car window worth $100s for less than $1 in loose change, or will tear up $1000s worth of equipment for $2 worth of copper at the scrap metal recycler. They could be driven to that kind of behavior out of desperation, or anger at a society that has sidelined them. I'm taking about the sort of person who does appear to fit in and who doesn't need the extra $100, but takes it anyway.

There's also the famous Stanford prison experiment. That shows that what seem to be decent people can be tempted into becoming monsters. Or in other words, power corrupts.

It's not easy keeping the wrong sorts of people away from power, but we could definitely do better. If testing can help, we ought to do it.

I know that. The problem is as you said: "If it's easier for them to cheat or steal, they'll do that." Yes, many will. But, there are also many people who won't cheat and steal. Capitalism and democracy have been effective at harnessing selfishness for the good of all. Yet democracy in particular doesn't work if the majority of the people are selfish fools. We must have honest people for it all to work. Plus, education is crucial so that people aren't as foolish.

Your argument is completely ridiculous. I've had this very discussion about the price of life with people who are not psychopaths. While we might not agree on what the exact "price of life" should be, we all realized that there are no endless resources for dealing with these situations and people need to get real about it. The reason nothing happens with this is simply politics and religion.

You obviously have never studied psychopathy at all. You really should before making such arguments because I can

To prevent 50% of the remaining deaths (this report was commissioned by Zeno, by the way), the cost increases by $1000.00. And so on. There is a point where someone must say, "Yeah, the harm done by increasing costs that much outweighs the value of the lives saved." An "empathic" person would be unable to draw that line, as he'd be unable to say "Some known percentage of people will die in accidents, people who COULD have been saved if we'd spent more money."

Being a psychopath isn't about being rational. If anything they're not. In this example, the psychopath cares neither about money being wasted nor people dying in car accidents. Instead they're going to find a way to simply steal the money.

Or in a less knee-jerk way: have we verified that this is actually a problem? What issues arise from psychopaths being in these positions of authority? Is there a way we can mitigate those negative effects while still playing to the strengths of the psychopath?

The characteristic lack of remorse or shame leads psychopaths to a fervent belief that "rules are for other people".

This results in catastrophes like the recent Banking/Finance issues in the US and the recent "rogue trader" excesses (UBS, and others).

"It's only against the law if you get caught" is a prime Directive of psychopaths.

And yet somehow you think there's ANY reason we want these people running anything?

Seriously folks, their behaviour is classed as antisocial for a reason, read the words - ANTI SOCIAL.

I don't know why there is this perception that psychopaths, or more properly sociopaths, are some kind of aliens among us. Why does anyone think that perfectly normal people can't behave in a similar fashion? After all, power corrupts.

If you knew anything about psychopathy, you would know that it's simply not possible for normal people to think like a psychopath. For example, it's simply not possible for them to feel remorse. The wiring just doesn't exist in their brain. While normal people can occasionally do bad things, they are hardly the same people.

Seriously folks, their behaviour is classed as antisocial for a reason, read the words - ANTI SOCIAL.

By Definition BAD FOR THE ENTIRE SOCIETY.

That is NOT the defintion of antisocial. It is not necessarily bad for society. There was an article [economist.com] in the Economist that describes a study that found that people with cold emotional detachment are exactly who should be running things.

This is especially apparent in military leaders. In the American Civil war, leaders like McClellan and Meade were known for their compassion and concern for the welfare of their troops. But hundreds of thousands died unnecessarily because they failed to push for a decisive victory early in the war. More emotionally detached generals like Grant and Stonewall Jackson were far more effective.

How many allied troops died in Normandy due to Monty's dithering? Meanwhile "blood and guts" Patton was encircling 40,000 Nazi troops at Falaise.

However, your argument fails because the ability to emotionally detach from a situation is not the same as the inability to form emotional attachments at all.

A psychopath cannot honestly take a loyalty oath, whether to enter a military service or uphold a fiduciary duty, because they are physically incapable of that loyalty. This problem is actually the stated crux of the last article linked in the summary.

Emotional detachment is not the same as a psychopath. The psychopath has no empathy, so the suffering of others creates no emotion to be detached from.

If a psychopath kills a baby while stealing its lollipop, he literally feels nothing for the child or the parents. His one and only concern is to make sure no consequences land on him. He will feel no emotion for the poor sap he frames for the crime either. As long as he gets away with it, he will have no regrets at all. If he doesn't kill the baby, it is ONL

What issues arise from psychopaths being in these positions of authority?

I watched one completely destroy the IT department I worked at a few jobs ago.

Dude was the passive-aggressive kind of putz. His first act as head of IT was to dig up (and in some cases invent) things to formally write-up everyone that he perceived as a threat to his authority. His next step was to rip out carefully-laid and in-progress projects and start re-wiring them to align with his goals (goals which, curiously enough, we were never really informed of aside from a bunch of acronyms. That said, we were already doing such things as ITIL and PCI compliance, among others... apparently he had other plans). The worst part is, he tried to pretend that he had the same skills... in spite of periodically destroying his laptop (malware aplenty) and once turning an Oracle DB testbed into mush, then blaming the DBA for it (VM snapshots are beautiful things...) I won't even begin to describe how much money this guy blew off into the ether on unneeded and unnecessary consultants, equipment, and worse.

Most of us began quitting in droves as better opportunities arose - myself included. Out of the original crew, only one stayed behind, and I think she only stayed to finish off the tuition reimbursement program that the company once had.

They eventually pushed him out (according to his LinkedIn profile, he's been "exploring opportunities" since earlier this year.) Too late though, I think... the company has been suffering pretty hard due to cost overruns and the increasing amount of bork-ups in its manufacturing automation (guess why...) I'm not really sure if they'll survive due to a market sector that's going to crap plus a rotten economy overall. We're talking about fuck-ups that will likely push 1500 people in the local area to the unemployment line if they collapse.

Long story short? Be damned careful who you pick to sling around the expensive and important parts of your company. A more competent and less ass-hatted IT leader would have kept costs lower, kept an eye on what's truly important, listened to the warnings and rational dissent from his reports, and not driven away the critical staff that built and knew the damned thing in the first place.

That sounds more like some miscellaneous psychosis than psychopathy. Maybe a bit of narcissism. Psychopaths more generally use others for their own advancement without empathy, and usually appear to be both friendly and technically competent.

There was this housing bubble thingy popping and a bunch of people foreclosed on, perhaps you heard about it.

Then there was that time they spilled all the oil in the Gulf. I think that got a mention or two.

Going back a way, there was that whole Wall Street love affair with 'chainsaw Al' until they realized that he was just as willing to cook the books to make his bonus as he was to fire half a company and collect their pay as his personal bonus.

To some extent, perhaps, though a lot of what went on in Wall Street leading up to the crash could only be considered success providing the insanely hideous effects on 99.9% of the population were discounted. The difference between a sociopath and a normal person is that a normal person possesses empathy, and empathy means that they will at least make a small effort to weigh personal benefit against benefit to their fellowman (including, but not limited to investors), whereas a sociopath/psychopath is in it for the thrills and power, and will happily drive the institution they're in charge of into a brick wall if there is immediate short term benefit to themselves.

There's no denying there is a place for insane risk takers, but as Captains of Industry (or whatever they're called these days), not so much.

The difference between a sociopath and a normal person is that a normal person possesses empathy, and empathy means that they will at least make a small effort to weigh personal benefit against benefit to their fellowman.

Or perhaps we should just accept that individual choices can allow people to overcome any lack of anything? Empathy or not, everyone has a chance to be a good human being. We're getting dangerously close to labelling people here not based on actions or life choices but simply a pre-determined judgement that can be made at a young age

Indeed it is terrifying - it's clear that their spelling is already invading Canada. We already seem to have lost our centre, we'll soon be colourless and before you know it Thanksgiving will be in November.

Bingo, our numerous neighbours to the south can choose between pretty right (Clinton liberalized the rules that created the mortgage meltdown) that some choose to label "left wing" because their actual preference is to the right of Attila the Hun (fact checking required.) Their other choice is feigning to be further right but is actually a conspiracy by one percenters to wrap themselves in populist b.s. (religious, libertarian, conservative, or whatever comes to hand.) and maximize their federal returns... frankly looks like 'murricans are screwed either way, and the two party system is a sham. So like wake up folks: both your parties are far right, and this perpetual bike shedding looks quite silly in front of the fiscal cliff.

As a neighbour, and most of our economy is trading with you guys, we know that if you all don't pull it together, we are going over that cliff right a long with you, yee haw! So while I get that it's none of our business... well it kind of is our business too, and all we can do is watch, and it is terrifying.

Or take Obamacare. On one hand, it gives access to healthcare to people who couldn't afford it. On the other hand, it charges *everyone else* through the nose to pay for the former group.

Actually, the idea is that socialised health care costs so much less (and demonstrably so) that the rich don't pay more (often less in fact), and the poor get health care. Win win.

The reason we are amazed that you think plans like obamacare are crazy, radical plans is because they're still pretty damn right wing. Obama care is much less socialised than most health care in europe. There's nothing "radical left wing" about being more right wing than the majority of the world.

So there is no particular reason that a "left" policy cannot be democratic and successful.

The reason had been discovered, and it's not a secret. To build a socialist society you need a socialist man. Without that a handful of hardcore socialists will be toiling day and night to feed the less-than-socialist men. That was one of main reasons of decline of USSR, and the same is the reason for decline of the society in the USA. I don't know about Denmark, but thousands of successful entrepreneurs ran from Sw

You might have missed the part where Denmark consistently ranks as the happiest country in the world. People like the social system. It is not a communist system: the economy is market-based, entrepreneurship is encouraged, and people make different levels of income. But there is a strong social system and good public benefits, and by and large this makes the society better. For example, compared to the United States, crime is much lower, and I don't walk past homeles

There are so many nutjobs to choose from. I guess we can tell where you come from.

No mainstream politician has any interest in reducing the national debt. Reagan was the first president to raise the national debt after WW II, close to tripled it. Clinton actually started it down the road to lessening it, then Bush II also came close to tripling it, although Obama's own contribution could also be said to nearly triple it, but Bush II and Obama are s

...they go off campaigning in Las Vegas. Then when people ask them about it, they duck and cover and say they are conducting their own investigation. So much for "the most transparent administration in history...."

Yes indeed. The fundamental problem is that these firms are themselves essentially sociopathic. It's little wonder they attract psychopaths.

Frankly, I think the best cure is one "man in black" in an isolated, sound proof cubicle with a direct line to the SEC in one hand and a machine gun in the other. When the call comes in, there goes the firm, psychopaths and all.